Chương 2: Tutorial Skip

His crying ran out all at once and left him empty and stupid in the dirt. In the quiet after, he heard the footstep. One foot, setting down slow in dead leaves. Close. Behind him and a little to the left. Not the careless step of someone who didn't know he was there. The careful step of someone who did. Kaito turned his head. There was a man at the edge of the trees. Lean, wrapped in road-colored cloth, a strip of it pulled up over the lower half of his face. He'd been there a while.

You could tell by how still he was — the patient stillness of a person who had done this before and was in no hurry to do it fast. A spear was slung across his back, and his hand was already going up over his shoulder for it, unhurried, certain.

'Okay,' Kaito thought.

'New world. First person I meet. He wants to kill me.' He did the math without meaning to. Strength four. No weapon. Legs that had failed him over a knee-high branch an hour ago. The man had reach, a blade, and the easy balance of someone who ate by being better at this than whoever he found in the road. There was no version of standing his ground that didn't end with him on the spear. So he ran. It was not good running. His body still didn't believe it was his.

He came up off the road in a lurch, got his feet under him on the third stride, and pointed himself downhill through the trees, because down was faster than up and faster was the only plan he had. Behind him the man started to move. Not running. Walking quick. That was the worst part. The man didn't need to run. Branches caught his arms. The slope dropped and he went with it, half-falling, grabbing trunks to stay upright, breath already tearing in and out of him like he'd sprinted a mile. He hadn't.

He'd run maybe forty meters. Four. The number was going to get him killed. Then the trees opened, and his feet figured it out before his head did. A tower. It stood alone in a clearing at the bottom of the slope, pale stone going up into the bright wrong sky, and he knew it the second he saw it. He'd built it. The starting spire. The first thing a new player ever climbed, where the game taught you which end of the sword to hold. He'd put a door at the base, wide and friendly, an arch you couldn't miss.

The door was still there. It was the only thing in the world he was sure of, so he ran at it. He hit the threshold and went through into shadow and spun around with his back to cold stone, chest heaving, ready for the man to come through after him. The man didn't come through after him. He'd stopped. Out in the clearing, ten steps short of the door, the spear half-raised and going nowhere. He was looking at the tower the way you look at a dog you're not sure is chained. For a second neither of them moved.

Then the man lowered the spear. He didn't put it away. He just let it down, and he looked at Kaito standing in the dark doorway, and something in his eyes went from hungry to something that was almost, in a sick way, pity.

"Huh," he said. His voice carried flat across the clearing.

"It's all yours." He turned and walked back up into the trees, easy as anything, like he'd just watched Kaito do something much worse to himself than getting robbed. Kaito stood in the doorway and breathed and tried to make that mean something good. It wouldn't go.

'They don't come in here,' he thought.

'Whatever this is, they don't come in.' He turned around to look at what he'd run into. It was his tower, and it was wrong. The entry hall ran out ahead of him, and it was too long. He'd built this room twelve meters deep. He knew the number because he'd argued about it. Now it went back and back, twice that, maybe more, the far end lost in a grey that wasn't quite dark. The ceiling was too high. The light came from nowhere he'd put a light. It just sat in the air, even and sourceless.

Halfway down the too-long hall, a figure stood waiting. He knew him too. He'd made him. A bent old man in a brown robe with a long grey beard — a mentor for brand-new players, three lines of dialogue and a wave. Kaito had been too tired to name him anything clever. In the files he was Greybeard, because he had a grey beard, and that was as far as Kaito's brain had gotten at four in the morning. Greybeard turned to face him. He turned too far. His head came around smooth and kept coming, past where a neck stops.

Then his body caught up to it in one wrong motion, and he faced Kaito with both eyes and a gentle old smile that didn't reach anything behind it. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Welcome, traveler," Greybeard said.

"Every hero starts here." The smile held, and held, and the voice came again without the face moving at all.

"Every hero starts here. None of them finish." Kaito's skin went cold. He had written the first line. He had absolutely not written the second. A box opened in the air between them. Blue border. His font. The words inside were not the cheerful prompt he'd typed six years ago. [First Trial. The chamber does not open until it is fed.]'The System told me I could skip this,' he thought.

'Authorized and everything.' He read it again. Fed. He'd written this quest. He'd written it as Strike the training dummy to learn to fight. Friendly. Bloodless. A thing to make a scared kid feel brave. Somewhere in the years he'd been dead, somebody had taken his harmless little lesson and put teeth in it. A sound came from the far end of the hall. A wet, heavy slap. Something dragging itself across stone. It came out of the grey toward him, and he knew it before he could see it clearly, because he knew the color.

Green. The wrong green. The same flat, too-bright green as the grass he'd woken up in, the placeholder he'd never fixed. A slime. His slime. The first monster in the game, the one every player killed in their first five minutes so they'd learn that killing things gave you numbers. He'd built it to be the safest fight in the world. Four health. No teeth. A soft thing that bumped into you and popped. This one was the size of a wheelbarrow. It came down the hall fast. Not the slow wobble he'd coded.

It moved like it wanted him, low and quick across the stone, throwing a wave of itself out ahead as it came. Kaito did the one thing his body knew how to do, which was get out of the way badly. He threw himself sideways and the slime went past where he'd been and hit the wall and came apart and pulled itself back together, already turning, already coming again.

'Think. You built this. Think.' There was a rack on the wall to his right. Wooden, leaning, a row of training swords on it — props, blunt, the cheapest weapons in the game, the kind you handed a player who'd never held one. He'd put that rack there himself, to teach the grab-a-weapon button. He grabbed a weapon. The sword was dull and light and basically a stick. Against anything real it was a joke. But he wasn't trying to hurt the body. He didn't need to.

Every monster in his game had a weak point, because that was the lesson — aim for the bright spot. He'd given the tutorial slime the most obvious weak point he could draw, so even the worst player in the world would get it. A core. A single bright bead of light sitting somewhere in the green, and one clean hit on it ended the thing no matter how weak you were. He'd made the core a free kill on purpose. The behavior had changed. The body had changed. He was betting everything that the bones hadn't.

The slime came again. This time he didn't dodge. He waited, heart slamming, until it was almost on him, and then he looked — really looked — into the green for the light. There. Low and to the left, half-buried, a small hard point of brightness sliding through the muck of it. He brought the training sword down on the core with everything seven points of strength would give him, which was not much, but the core had never cared about much. The slime stopped.

It hung there for half a second, mid-lunge, the bright bead pinned under the blunt point of his prop sword. Then it sagged, all at once, and the green ran off it and went still and grey on the floor, and the light in the middle of it went out. [First Trial complete.] The room exhaled. He felt it more than heard it — the grey at the far end thinning, the too-high ceiling settling back toward a height that made sense.

Kaito stood over the dead slime with a toy sword in his hand, and for one stupid second he wanted to apologize to it.

'It's a slime,' he told himself.

'You made it to die. That was the whole point of it.' It didn't help as much as it should have. More boxes opened, and these he half knew — the shape of progress he'd spent six years designing for other people. [Level 2.] His strength climbed from four to seven. Agility, zero to three. Endurance, zero to five. His health read thirty over thirty where a minute ago there'd been nothing at all. He flexed his hand. It felt, barely, like a hand that might clear a knee-high branch on the first try. It wasn't much.

It was more than four. Then another box, and this one made the back of his neck prickle. [Skill gained: Observation.] He stared at it. He hadn't chosen that. He didn't have a class yet — the panel still said no class, the slot still empty. Skills came from classes. That was a rule. He'd helped write the rule. You did not get a skill before you got a class, the same way you didn't get a roof before you got walls. The box sat there in his font, calm and impossible.

Then another box flickered up behind it — narrow, clipped, gone almost before it formed. He caught three words. [Anomaly. Source un—] It blinked out. The space where it had been smoothed over, like the System had said something out loud and then decided it would rather he hadn't heard.

'That wasn't for me to see,' he thought, and he didn't like how sure of it he was. He stood in the quiet, holding a prop sword over a puddle of his own design, an old man with a wrong neck at his back, and he made himself breathe. Then a box opened. It came without a sound. That was the thing he noticed first, before he even read it, because every box so far had come with a tone — a soft note he felt in his teeth more than heard. This one didn't.

It slid up out of nothing in total silence, the same blue, the same serif font he'd fought for in year one. There was a single word inside it. [Kaito.] He went very still. Nothing in this world knew that name. He'd worked it out an hour ago, crouched in the road with his hand in a rut his own code had cut — nobody who lived here had ever known his name, and nobody ever would. The road didn't know it. The slime didn't know it. The man with the spear hadn't asked. The box knew it.

He looked around the empty hall, at the cooling green and the still old man and the door full of wrong bright daylight, and there was no one. He looked back at the box. It was already gone. No sound when it left, either. Just the word, and then not even that, and no way to be sure he'd seen it at all.

"... Hello?" he said, out loud, to a tower he had built and did not understand anymore. Nothing answered. He gripped the toy sword a little tighter and started down the hall toward the door, because someone in here knew his name, and he wanted very badly to be somewhere else before they said it again.